Today, efforts are being increased globally for reducing greenhouse gas due to global warming, and reduction of the greenhouse gas has been promoted through a target management system and emissions trading globally. A refrigerant (HFC134a) for a vehicle has a global warming potential 1340 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Therefore, a method of processing refrigerants of disused vehicles that have been increased every year is required.
According to a standard (KSI 3004) of the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards, six physical property standards should be satisfied to reuse refrigerants. Among them, a reuse standard of an evaporation residue is 0.01% or less. However, acidity or moisture may be removed using a filter, or the like, while a high boiling point evaporation residue may not be removed. Particularly, since tens of grams of oil are injected together with refrigerants, they are collected together with the refrigerants during the collection of refrigerants of all vehicles.
The following Table 1 shows measurement results of contents of oil in refrigerants collected from a junkyard. Since waste refrigerants contain a substantial amount of oil due to characteristics thereof, even though a heat exchanger according to the related art for removing the oil has been installed in a refrigerant collector, contents of oil as shown in the following Table 1 were confirmed. These numeral values are numeral values greater than 0.01%, which is the reuse standard of the evaporation residue, and it may be difficult to reuse the waste refrigerants due to the oil contained therein, which is the high boiling point evaporation residue.
TABLE 1Waste RefrigerantABCDEFGContent (%) of Oil8.82.826.87.93.92.09.5